Charles Taylor Pleads Not Guilty to War Crimes

FREETOWN, Sierra Leone, April 3 — In his first appearance before a special international tribunal, Charles G. Taylor, the former Liberian president, pleaded not guilty to 11 counts of war crimes, but not before refusing to recognize the court's jurisdiction and accusing it of attempting to meddle in the region's affairs.

"I think this is an attempt to divide and rule the people of Liberia and Sierra Leone and so most definitely I am not guilty," said Mr. Taylor amid tight security at a crowded hearing before the Special Court for Sierra Leone, a United Nations-backed tribunal.

"I did not and could not have committed these acts against the sister republic of Sierra Leone," said Mr. Taylor, who was arrested while trying to flee Nigeria last Wednesday and then sent here to face trial.

Dressed in a double-breasted blue suit, a white shirt with cufflinks and a red tie, Mr. Taylor seemed defiant. At times he was even upbeat, blowing a kiss to members of his family seated in the packed courtroom and flashing a wide grin.

Eventually Mr. Taylor said he did, and then argued that as "Liberian's 21st president," the court held no jurisdiction over him.

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Charles Taylor, the former Liberian president, made his first appearance today before the Special Court for Sierra Leone.Credit
Pool photo by George Osodi

The former warlord betrayed no emotion as the nine-page indictment — detailing charges from terrorizing the civilian population to sexual violence to the recruitment of child soldiers — was read to him.

The core of the prosecution's case against Mr. Taylor is that he aided the rebels who plunged Sierra Leone into 11 years of chaos and killing, as they sought control of the country's lucrative diamond fields. The country was Africa's second richest at its independence in 1961.

The war, which ended in 2002, left 50,000 dead and thousands maimed as both rebels and a progovernment militia used torture, rape and amputations to terrorize the civilian populations. Mr. Taylor joins nine other indicted by the court whose trials are under way.

Fears that Mr. Taylor's presence in Sierra Leone — where the last of 17,500 peacekeepers left three months ago — could destabilize the entire region has led the court to request his transfer to an available courtroom at The Hague.

Liberia's newly elected president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, has also requested that Mr. Taylor be removed from the region. A draft resolution is being circulated at the Security Council to authorize the move to the Netherlands. Pending approval from the Dutch, the transfer would be a matter of logistics.

However, with the court's principal defender, Vincent O. Nmehielle, serving as his counsel, Mr. Taylor indicated that he would fight any move to transfer the trial to The Hague, insisting that he could only receive a fair trial in Sierra Leone.

Even some of Mr. Taylor's former allies have suggested that his presence in Sierra Leone could have a destabilizing effect.

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The former Liberian president met with his lawyers, above, for the first time shortly before his court appearance. Credit
Issouf Sanogo/AFP -- Getty Images

Jonathan Kposowa, the secretary general of the political wing of the Revolutionary United Front, a group once allied with Mr. Taylor, said in an interview that "the distances are short" between Liberia and Sierra Leone. Mr. Taylor is still a popular man in some pockets in Liberia, he added.

Indicted in absentia in 2003, Taylor was then offered asylum in Nigeria under a peace accord to end Liberia's 14 years of on-again, off-again war that claimed 250,000 lives and left Liberia, a country founded by freed American slaves, little more than a shell of a state.

Mr. Taylor's appearance in court capped a dramatic nine days that began with Nigeria's announcement last Saturday that it would honor the request made by Ms. Johnson Sirleaf to hand her predecessor over to international authorities.

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But Mr. Taylor fled his plush villa in Calabar, and recriminations flew across the Atlantic, with a senior United States congressmen accusing Nigeria's president, Olusegun Obasanjo of facilitating Mr. Taylor's escape.

K. A. Paul, the Indian-born evangelist who is Mr. Taylor's spiritual advisor, said that Mr. Taylor told him in a telephone conversation from his jail cell here that he tried to flee Nigeria because Nigerian state security agents told him to leave. He was escorted, he said, to a spot near the border with Cameroon in northeastern Nigeria by government officials.

"They took him and they drove for so many hours," Mr. Paul said in a telephone interview. "Around 4:30 or 5 in the morning they told him to go and they left him."

Mr. Taylor was arrested by border officials in Nigeria at around 5 a.m. last Wednesday.

A Nigerian government spokesman, Femi Fani-kayode, told the Associated Press that Mr. Paul's account was a "far-fetched figment of his jaundiced imagination."

Hans Nichols reported from Freetown for the article, and Lydia Polgreen from Dakar, Senegal.